When Corruption Becomes a Capital Crime: China’s War on Flies and Tigers

In China, "political accountability" sometimes ceases to be a metaphor. In early July, a court in Changzhou sentenced Yang Youlin, a former senior official in Nanjing, to death after finding that he had accepted more than 2.21 billion yuan—around $325 million—in bribes over three decades. He was not convicted of murder or terrorism. Money, land, business deals and the abuse of public power were enough for the state to conclude that his debt to society had become greater than his right to live.

Cruel, some will say. Others may find an almost ancient appeal in such a verdict. A man who lived above the law for decades finally encounters a law greater than himself. In a world where a small debtor can lose his home, a worker can lose his wages, and a politician caught with millions often loses nothing more than his position, the fall of an untouchable figure provides genuine social satisfaction. Of course, it is not quite that simple, and the colder question remains: will the next official genuinely refuse a bribe because he might end up like Yang, or has the state merely staged a convincing spectacle of justice? It is difficult to give a definitive answer encompassing every moral, ethical and practical dimension. But perhaps the answer also depends on how long a society has endured watching its biggest thieves escape all consequences.

The Western debate usually begins and ends with the claim that the death penalty is cruel. That argument cannot be dismissed. Death, however it is inflicted, is cruel. Yet this argument is often accompanied—rather conveniently—by a peculiar leniency toward crimes committed with an official stamp. Corruption may not always leave a body at the crime scene, but it can still produce casualties: a hospital without equipment, a bridge built with substandard materials, a fire-protection system that exists only on paper, or a poisoned river. Corruption is often violence translated into the language of budget lines.

Chinese law therefore does not treat particularly serious embezzlement and bribery as polished white-collar offences. When the sums involved are enormous and the harm inflicted on the state and the public is exceptionally severe, the law permits the death penalty. Yet most senior officials "sentenced to death" receive a two-year reprieve. If they commit no further serious intentional crime during that period, the sentence is usually commuted to life imprisonment. In corruption cases, courts may rule out any subsequent reduction of the sentence or possibility of parole. The death penalty has been imposed in law, but in practice it becomes life behind walls until life itself ends.

This is where the science becomes uncomfortable for anyone who prefers simple answers. Deterrence theory distinguishes between the severity, certainty and speed of punishment. In a striking experiment involving more than 600 Indonesian road projects, raising the probability of a government audit from four to 100 percent reduced the share of "missing" expenditure from 27.7 to 19.2 percent, although some favouritism shifted into harder-to-measure forms of nepotism. An analysis of 25 European Union countries between 2013 and 2024 likewise linked lower corruption to certain and timely punishment, but not to its severity. Even in the case of murder, for which much more data exists, no additional deterrent effect from executions can be reliably demonstrated.

A corrupt official knows his superiors, the businesspeople around him and the loopholes in the system. He does not merely ask what punishment awaits him, but whether he is likely to be caught at all. If he has spent years watching colleagues take kickbacks and receive promotions, an execution will look like a distant misfortune reserved for the careless or politically abandoned. By contrast, reliable audits, traceable transactions and protected whistleblowers can make even a ten-year prison sentence feel terrifyingly close.

China is also an almost impossible laboratory. There is no statistically identical version of China in which everything else remains the same and only the death penalty has been removed. The number of executions is a state secret, while the campaign simultaneously transforms the law, oversight, policing and the balance of political power. More convictions may indicate more corruption—or simply better detection of corruption that was already there. There is therefore no scientific basis for attributing China’s results specifically to the threat of death.

Of course, a system capable of punishing any powerful figure also chooses which powerful figure to investigate. China’s campaigns can expose real and enormous theft while simultaneously serving to consolidate political power, the two functions are not mutually exclusive. Executing one "tiger" may demonstrate that no one is untouchable, but it may also conceal the network that created him. A dead convict can no longer expose his protectors or live to see a wrongful verdict overturned. The more final the punishment, the greater the trust that must be placed in those who impose it.

Comparisons with other countries nevertheless weaken the argument that death is a necessary remedy. Vietnam abolished the death penalty for embezzlement and bribery in July 2025 and commuted outstanding death sentences to life imprisonment. Thailand still prescribes it for accepting bribes, but there is no known case of anyone being executed for that offence. Indonesia retained it "on paper" until 2025 but never applied it, while the new Criminal Code now makes life imprisonment the harshest penalty, though some legal ambiguity remains during the transition. Iran can classify major economic crimes under the broad category of "corruption on Earth," which may carry a death sentence.

A death sentence proves that the state can kill a corrupt man. It does not prove that the state has built a system corruption cannot capture. Consistency is the key. Both "flies and tigers" must fall if society is to remain healthy and citizens are to believe that the system was not designed against them. No system is perfect—far from it—but a system that merely slaps its biggest thieves on the wrist and hands them symbolic punishments is plainly designed to breed more thieves at every level. Such a system can only decay, eventually reaching the point of its own disintegration. A consistent system, even an imperfect one, strengthens people’s belief that they are not living in a game rigged for someone else. And if a head occasionally rolls, that sense of security remains intact.